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Abstract
Corporate reputation is defined as stakeholder's overall assessment of a company's performance over time. It reflects multiple stakeholders' perceptions about organization's effectiveness. Companies with high reputation create competitive advantage and are more likely to influence customers' behaviors and attitudes.
The main purpose of this study is to analyze Volkswagen's reputation after the emission scandal from the perspective of Turkish customers and also explain the effects of Volkswagen reputation on customer intentions and outcome variables as customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, customer trust, repurchase and word of mouth. For this purpose, research questionnaire was designed by researchers to measure reputation and customer variables and understand the interactions. 253 Volkswagen customers and noncustomers have participated in the research. Results show that corporate reputation has a positive influence on both customer intentions and outcomes.
Keywords:Volkswagen, reputation, customer-based reputation, customer intentions, and customer outcomes
1.INTRODUCTION
Corporate reputation is an intangible asset that enhances value creation and sustains competitive advantage for a long period. Reputation is among the intangible assets that is extremely hard to imitate, which turns it into a valuable source of competitive advantage (Alsop, 2004). It is overall and final attribution of multiple stakeholders (Fombrun, 1996). It is the sum of past and present actions and results of the organizations that describing the capacity to obtain valuable results for various stakeholders (Castro et al., 2006; Dortok, 2006). Reputation is emerged over time through communication and takes for a long time to build (Brewer and Zhao, 2010). Companies can benefit from favorable corporate reputation in many ways such as attracting investment and high qualified employees, having a cost advantage, enhancing new product development and having more loyal customers (Leaniz and Rodriguez, 2016).
Research has mainly focused on the effects of corporate reputation on financial performance (Roberts and Dowling, 2002; Sabate and Puente, 2003; Eberl and Schwaiger, 2005). Also, the effects of corporate reputation on customer behavior are discussed in many studies (Keh and Xie, 2009; Walsh, Mitchell and Jackson, 2009; Helm, Eggert and Garnefeld, 2010; Bartiwoski and Walsh, 2011; Walsh and Beaty, 2007). Corporate reputation research generally found out that personal experience has the greatest impact on the reputation formation (Ragas et al., 2014).
If organizations want to manage their reputation, they should focus on its behavioral...